I am Founder and Principal at Bersin by Deloitte, leading provider of research-based membership programs in human resources (HR), talent and learning. Hundreds of the Global 2000 and Fortune 1000 use our proven people strategies to drive exceptional business results.

I've spent much of my career in technology, sales, marketing, and business leadership and I actively write about major global trends in leadership, management, HR and talent management technologies. I live in the San Francisco area, close enough to Silicon Valley to keep up with new technology and its impact on the business of talent.

The End of a Job as We Know It

Let me explain. Over the last year I’ve been speaking with corporate business and human resource leaders and hearing a common theme: we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign our organization to build dynamic cross-functional teams, communicate faster, and rapidly find experts.

Well this quest for the agile organization has changed the nature of what we call a job. Jobs are turning into roles, roles are becoming more highly specialized, and the new currency of value is expertise, not simply experience.

Pfizer has set “increase business agility” as one of its four goals for the coming year. The company created an internal labor marketplace called PfizerWorks that lets employees bid on work from each other, encouraging people to deepen their specialties and expand their sphere of influence.

Executives at Siemens told me that their biggest challenge is moving engineers into new roles so they can focus on new product areas. In the past people were rewarded for moving upward – now they must reward people for moving horizontally.

InBev (Anheuser Busch), Scotiabank, and MetLife have all launched global talent mobility programs to force people to gain global awareness and expand business opportunities.

Something very profound is happening. Jobs are getting more specialized, people work in teams and cross functional boundaries, and success is being redefined by expertise, not span of control.

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The question I am wondering is what does this mean for modern education as it clearly speaks right to the issue that people who are going to school (including myself) are learning very general things. For example, I am in computer science and mathematics and learning the fundamentals, but most of my upper year classes consist of a variety of different things and I do not have an option to say, specialize in network communications.

So does this make university degrees less valuable and college diplomas more so( As college provides more specialized in hands on learning )? Note: I am coming from Canada, so I don’t know if the US have the same distinctions between college and university.

I think it is an important point to raise, as most of my university friends are in much more general programs than myself, such as the social sciences and relate-able fields where they are learning only a small amount of skills that they can put to use in their working fields and are learning more theoretical knowledge from an older curriculum.

Yes. Traditional education is less valuable than it has been in years. Companies want skilled employees, not generalists. If you can gain deep work experience during your younger years, this depth will pay off throughout your career.

mowk the general skills are very important. Without the generalist skills the specialist skills are very weak and would take too long to learn. Specialist skills are built on top of the generalist ones. Also the generalist can pick up the specialist portion very quickly. Without a solid base you cannot be a specialist over the long term.

Interesting article, Josh. The mechanisms you describe relate to the work of Zygmunt Bauman, a relation that I’ve tried to pinpoint in a recent blog post, might interest you as well: http://bit.ly/ofyqMh

Thank you Henk-Jelle, some good reading here. We did a lot of research on learning culture (High-Impact Learning Culture) and it was inspired by much of Edward Schein’s work. We are introducing these concepts to HR leaders around the world and they are very very interested in finding ways to embrace and adopt these more agile models for work. Let’s keep in touch.

Hi Josh, the fact you mention Schein is exemplar, as you can read here: http://bit.ly/xeQ9A2. We clearly think and read along similar lines. I will be happy to follow your efforts to cross from concepts to impact on these things. Let’s keep in touch indeed.

Excellent read and somewhat disturbing. While corporations would love their employees to specialize, workers would be penalized in the end. I can’t begin to count how many I know who are so specialized to their company’s processes that when they are laid off–and they will be–they are of no use to any other company. A good for instance: I am classically trained as a direct marketer (mail, telemarketing, etc.) yet few I come in contact with understand that online/digital/whatever you call it has it’s roots in the direct marketing industry. My point is that the direct marketing experience is relevant to the digital age and that its basic tenants apply to the most basest of the digital marketing experience.

Its actually positive for job-seekers. Now instead of randomly posting your resume on various job boards to look for work, you can maintain your LinkedIn profile and “work finds you.” The advertising engine in LinkedIn, for example, is very smart – so it constantly looks at your background and skills and recommends positions you may be interested in. And it does make us all “self-marketers” to a large degree, creating an army of consultants to help you “pimp your profile” and make yourself more attractive to employers.